EXTRA: Politically-speaking, when does a kid get to be a kid?

Insofar as I could see, Barron Trump was being a 10-year-old, which may be an obnoxious form of the human species, but nothing that we’d consider criminal.

How much of dad's blasts will land on son's shoulders

He fidgeted and squirmed and seemed to talk at times out of turn, but nothing that I haven’t seen many other kids of that age do.

SO I CAN kind of comprehend the offense being taken by some at people who dare to criticize the youngest of the Trump clan. There is a sense that we’re really focusing our ire at Donald J. by going after the most vulnerable of the family.

But I also have to question the motives of those who want to get all upset at anyone who dares point out the behavior of Barron – which from the bits I saw on television did border on the type of antics that, if I had done them as a kid, would have gotten me a threat of the back of my mother’s hand across my face.

How many of these same people all eager to praise Barron Trump and defend his honor are the same people all upset that there weren’t tons of reports about the Obama daughters.

No one could possibly be as clean as Malia and Sasha were during their eight years of living in the White House, is what they want to believe. It has to be a cover-up of illicit activity by the Obama brats, as they want to see it.

OF COURSE, THERE also are the outlandish stories that some people like to spew (and claim that accounts denying their legitimacy are the ultimate in “fake news”) about how the Obama daughters are adopted as part of a cover-up over the phoniness of the Obama marriage.

Would Barron's defenders have protected Obama girls?

In those stories, now former First Lady Michelle Obama is transvestite and “Barry” is just the ultimate freak! Nonsense, to be sure, but I wonder how many of those ideologues willing to defile an entire family’s reputation are now talking about the righteousness of la familia Trump.

Even Chelsea defended Barron

Some will say that protecting Barron is the same as the way that former first daughter Chelsea Clinton was protected from the public eye. Heck, Chelsea herself has issued statements in recent days saying people should back off the Trump kid.

But there are others who will claim it was wrong to keep hands off of Chelsea in those days. I’d wonder how many think only conservative ideologue kids deserve a private life. Which in my mind cheapens the whole issue.

Patrick had his own incident as a kid

BESIDES, THERE ARE times when a political kid’s activities get into the public eye.

I still remember back to 1992 when Patrick Daley, the son of Mayor Richard M., used his parents’ trip to New York as an excuse to have a party at the family home in Grand Beach, Mich.

Like many teen parties, it got out of hand. There was property damage, a shotgun was brandished and one teen wound up getting hit over the head with a baseball bat.

I remember thinking at the time this didn’t deserve all that much attention; how many teen parties filled with stupid antics got coverage. Although I remember being told by some of my reporter colleagues that Daley, the mayor, had a sanctimonious attitude toward others in embarrassing circumstances, and therefore deserved similar treatment.

PERHAPS THAT IS the same line of thinking some are taking toward Trump. Although it may well be that getting that incident so thoroughly out in the open was to Patrick’s benefit. He’s 41 now, and most certainly doesn’t have this skeleton in his closet. It’s truly a thing of the past.

Has Amy outgrown youthful protection?

At what point, however, does a political kid become “fair game” for criticism? I wonder if Amy Blagojevich is about to learn that lesson.

She’s understandably P-O’ed that no one is taking seriously the desire of her father, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for a reduction of his 14-year prison sentence seriously.

But using Facebook this week to say that now-former President Obama was “selfish and spineless” for not granting his request for a pardon or sentence commutation? Those are just the kind of “fighting words” that are likely to make her the target of criticism herself – political “kid” or not.

  -30-

Will Obama ever again actually reside in Kenwood-based house on So. Side?

I must confess – I always get amused whenever interests in Chicago try to stake a claim to their particular site as the “Future Home of the Barack Obama Presidential Library and Museum.”

Will the first family's decision really be in the hands of Sasha? Photographs provided by the White House

 

It’s not even a done deal that Obama himself will ever live in this city again. If that is the case, who’s to say that the future Obama Library will wind up here.

PERHAPS WE SHOULD be giving some serious consideration to the fact that the University of Hawaii is eager to have the library on its grounds – considering that the president himself was born, and largely raised, in Honolulu.

Maybe we shouldn’t take such a parochial attitude and assume that such a facility has to be built somewhere in Chicago. Heck, we can’t even agree where in the city ought to be thought of as the primary site.

The post-presidential future of Obama came in recent days when the president let it be known we shouldn’t assume he will be back in his home near the Hyde Park neighborhood right after the 2017 inauguration.

Obama and first lady Michelle may not be using Air Force One for their final flight home to Midway Airport. We don’t know where he’ll wind up.

IT SEEMS THE complicating factor is the younger daughter, Sasha, who was 7 when her family moved to Washington and started living the sheltered existence that the White House affords its residents.

The Obamas might not need final flight home

When her father ceases to be “Mr. President” and once again becomes “Dad,” she will be in her second year of high school. The first parents are concerned that having to suddenly transfer to a new school outside of Washington would be an uprooting that could cause harm.

The hints from the president are that he and Michelle may remain in the District of Columbia (Democrats generally live in D.C., while Republicans seem to prefer the D.C. suburbs in Virginia) until she’s finished with high school and ready to venture off on her own to college somewhere.

That leads to some jokes about how Sasha Obama runs the family, while others wonder if Obama just can’t let go of the Washington trappings.

SURPRISINGLY, I HAVEN’T heard many (only a few) wisecracks about how Obama doesn’t want to be put in a position where he’d have to defend himself for not returning Sasha to a spot in the Chicago Public Schools, or some sort of criticism if she wound up in the Laboratory Schools (private entities) of the University of Chicago.

Now, this could be a whole lot of talk about nothing. It may wind up that this is merely a three-year delay in Barack and Michelle returning to Chicago.

Although after more than a decade away, it may turn out that they’re not going to want to return to the streets of Hyde Park. There are times when life has to move forward, and going back (no matter how pleasant the memories) is just a mistake.

A part of me has always wondered if Obama might be thinking of a Hawaii retirement for himself and Michelle in their golden years. He gets to return home, and Michelle – the ultimate in a modern-day South Side girl – gets an exotic retirement.

DEFINITELY A LONG ways away from her early years in the South Shore neighborhood.

Could this be the future presidential library's site?

So for those people who want to bicker about whether a future presidential library is going to be built at the one-time Michael Reese Hospital site, or near the possible future Pullman National Park; on Lake Michigan at 79^th Street as part of the fantasized-about Chicago Lakeside development on the old U.S. Steel/South Works plant or as part of the campuses either at the University of Illinois at Chicago or at the University of Chicago – keep this is mind.

He may already have put his Chicago time in the rear view mirror of life.

  -30-

EXTRA: Progress in our mindset, why not theirs, when it comes to Burge, Sasha?

Perhaps I am paying too much attention these days to the conservative ideologues. Because I noticed a pair of stories in the news on Friday that gave me a smile, but in my mind I can already hear the irate rants that will come from the “right” that will see them as further evidence of our society being flushed down the drain.

One of those stories, of course, was the fact that one-time Pullman Area police Commander Jon Burge finally had to stand before a judge on Friday and hear his fate – 4 ½ years in prison.

THAT’S 54 MONTHS, significantly higher than the 21- to 27-month range that legal experts had said Burge could get for his convictions last year on charges that he did not testify truthfully in civil lawsuits filed against the police for his professional behavior some two decades ago.

That will please the people to whom Burge has become the poster boy for all that is wrong with law enforcement. I’m also sure that at age 63, time spent incarcerated in a federal correctional center will not be a pleasant experience – even if he winds up serving his time in a minimum-security work camp of sorts.

But you just know we’re going to hear the rants of the right; those people who thus far have reacted to the criminal case by saying that the people who suffered torture tactics while in police custody must have done something to deserve it.

That kind of attitude can be all too prevalent when it comes to people who are part of the criminal justice system, including those who regularly spend their time hanging around courthouses.

WHICH IS WHY I found it bold that U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow admitted while imposing sentencing that she took into account letters she received from the people who suffered from Burge and the police officers under his supervision.

As Lefkow put it, this case shows, “at the very least, a severe lack of respect for the due process of law and (Burge’s) refusal to acknowledge the truth in the face of all this evidence.”

For yes, even as of Friday, Burge says he did nothing wrong, although he said before being sentenced that he wished he had not brought “disrepute’ upon the Chicago Police Department. Which means he wishes he hadn’t got caught.

In my mind, that makes Burge as unrepentant as the lowest of criminals whom the conservative ideologues usually would be quick to denounce.

THE OTHER STORY that I’m sure will tick the ideologues off involves a cutesy report from the welcoming ceremony held Wednesday at the White House to honor China President Hu Jintao’s visit to the United States.

It seems that the younger of the two first daughters, Sasha Obama, is studying Chinese languages in school, and used her brief moment with Hu to speak with him in his own language. I also noticed in a wire service report that Sasha at one point was seen waving a miniature Chinese flag.



How long until Rush Limbaugh or some other conservative commentator tries to turn this moment into something unseemly? Photograph provided by the White House.



Personally, my mind comes up with a joke about Sasha Obama, all of 9, somehow managing to rewrite U.S. foreign policy toward China with her brief moment of speech with Hu.

You just know, however, that it will be only a matter of time (if it hasn’t happened already) before someone takes that photo of Sasha with a Chinese flag and puts it into a grotesque context. We may even hear some nonsense rhetoric about how U.S. children shouldn’t be dignifying other languages, and that this is an example of what is wrong with our nation.

YES, IT’S RIDICULOUS. Anybody who would seriously get that worked up over this is absurd. About as absurd as those people who continue to want to see Burge as an example of what our law enforcement ought to be.

Anybody who can’t see Burge for the flawed cop that he is also probably really thinks Sasha Obama is about to undermine our society. The rest of us, in fact the majority of us, ought to ignore that trite trash.

  -30-